Lockheed Gets Hacked

By Maggie Fox

Hackers attacked U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin last week, but did not get hold of data from customers, programs or employees, the company says.

Lockheed Martin said on Saturday night its information systems network had been the target of a "significant and tenacious attack," but said that its security team detected the intrusion "almost immediately and took aggressive actions to protect all systems and data," according to PC World.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense offered help, Bloomberg reports.

The impact on the military "is minimal and we don't expect any adverse effect," Lieutenant Colonel April Cunningham, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail quoted by Bloomberg.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, cyber attacks on agencies jumped 39 percent to 41,776 in 2010, up from 30,000 in 2009. The OMB also notes that the federal government spent about $12 billion on IT security, or about 15 percent of the roughly $80 billion total IT budget.

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But Howard Schmidt, the White House cybersecurity coordinator, told National Journal in April that a few sensational events make the overall cyber threat seem worse than it really is.

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